Asymmetric Incivility between US Republicans and Democrats on TikTok

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Yifei Wang, whose interest is in political polarisation on TikTok. In the US, polarisation is especially also expressed through affective polarisation and results in political incivility. However, such incivility has been studied more commonly on text-based than video-based platforms; video-based platforms like TikTok remain severely understudied.

Incivility on TikTok might be driven by the high level of anonymity and algorithmic amplification on the platform, and is likely to reflect perpetrators’ partisan identity; this may also be asymmetric between Republicans and Democrats. Incivility is also perpetrated in order to gain social approval from participants’ own side of the political divide, and can then generate attention on the platform. This might then also result in a spiral of incivility between posts and comments.

This project gathered some 160,000 videos for each of the #Democrat and #Republican hashtags and scraped their first 20 comments during 2023, and then calculated their level of incivility through the Google Perspective API. Republicans tended to post more uncivil posts than Democrats, and both for Republicans and Democrats higher levels of incivility also generated more shares, views, likes, and comments.

This points to asymmetrical patterns of incivility between the two sides of US politics on TikTok; this might be associated with some psychological features of Republicans as compared to Democrats. The rewarding of such content with more engagement might both train TikTok’s algorithms to further amplify such content, and lead video creators to generate more such uncivil videos. Social identity and social approval may interact with each other to amplify political incivility here. Overall, this may normalise aggressive, uncivil online communication on the platform.